


The Ghost Inside

by Meiloorun



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Sadface, Spoilers, rebel's resolve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 22:22:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3464240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meiloorun/pseuds/Meiloorun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hope was in a galaxy, far, far away from the doomed planet of Coruscant. Wherever it was, he was not welcome to hope in the wake of Order 66, because Caleb Dume could only expect to die.</p><p>My take on how Kanan escaped the slaughter at the Jedi Temple. Spoilers for Rebel's Resolve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghost Inside

 

 

Caleb Dune did not hope to survive.  

 

Hope was in a galaxy, far, far away from the doomed planet of Coruscant. Wherever it was, he was not welcome to hope in the wake of Order 66, because Caleb Dume could only expect to die.

 

Yet in his hiding spot, the Force survived through his misery. It exuded through his body like an electrical current and expanded his awareness like an ionized mist through the maze of fallen bodies. A sickly aura shrouded his senses, but Caleb had no doubt that there were no living other living Jedi in the temple, only one powerful, encompassing Sith presence. His certainty paralyzed him.

 

Despair soured the air with a noxious energy, draining the forteen-year-old of all his youthful advantages. It was an alien form of self-preservation which kept Caleb flattened to the metal grates of the ventilation shafts, barely breathing and still tasting the scent of charred human flesh. His muscles were cramped, his face was smeared with sweat and tears, but he still strained to see through the slats of the metal screen.

 

Caleb had no strength left for more cursing and crying after all that he had witnessed. The pedantic rabble of the clones filled the cavernous halls that had once contained eager students such as himself. He searched for life in each of the fallen bodies they dragged by his perch, but their lightless eyes simple bid him adieu as they were hauled around the corner into the main atrium. After several hours of this, the lines of troopers settled into an occasional patrol who turned into the hall every twenty minutes.

 

Caleb turned over the lightsaber in his hand that he had been holding to his chest. Easing his numbed fingers from the grip, he fumbled with the hilt and detached the ‘fractor lens from the crystal power supply. He held the two pieces weakly against his chest and struggled to take deep breaths. He hadn't needed the saber to turn and run into the dark ventilation shaft; he had no intentions of activating it now.

 

This was his Master's lightsaber. He could only guess that his own had been reclaimed by the stormtroopers. It was with an unspoken defiance in these wild days of war that padawans would gravitate to their Master’s saber for practice. His own saber was stuck in a perpetual state of reconstruction, so he had relied on practicing with Master Billaba’s. He was familiar with how the adjustable blade worked and it’s unique disassembly for camouflage in plain sight. Billaba was a better teacher than he could have ever hoped for, because as a padawan he left much to be desired.

 

Master Depa Billaba had championed the art of subtlety and swordplay in her early years working reconnaissance for potential Jedi. Having hand-picked him before his memories were fully-formed, she had doted upon Caleb like a younger brother and fondly accepted the awkward boy as a padawan when he was of age. Their elders were concerned that the ease with which they communicated would impede Caleb’s relationship to authority, but the stoic boy had blossomed into a defiant but brilliant strategist under her watchful (and attractive) eyes, such that they did not dare to doubt the partnership.

 

Billaba and he had had retreated to the back of the gym as usual to practice his stances. Practice made perfect, Billaba maintained. She gave her student greater allowances than most would to make up for his dyspraxic swordplay. That day, she had been chastising Caleb for his loose grip as he bit back at her about the unfavorable state of his saber’s titanium handle. She had disarmed him for the sixth time that morning when the first trooper rounded the corner. Billaba was patiently showing him her firm finger grip on her handle--again-- and offered him the hilt as she had done many times before. Then the stormtrooper silently raised his blaster and took aim at her head.

 

For a fraction of a second, Caleb thought he saw the shot pass clean through her neck, but Billaba preternaturally feinted away from the blaster bolt and it scorched the wall behind her. When she activated her lightsaber, relentless blaster fire filled their corner of the room. Billaba had pressed Caleb behind her as she swung the blasts into the squad rallied behind him. She deflected the rapid, unexplained volleys into the rogue troopers, knocking three to the ground. When the leader paused to reload, she swept towards the trooper with her Lothcat-like reflexes and activated Caleb’s lightsaber in her other hand, closing the blades around the troopers neck like scissors.

 

For once in their partnership did words fail them both. Billaba fell to the side of the wide door frame and glanced back at Caleb to share a pained glance in their moment of respite. Blaster fire and distant screams echoed into the gym through the opened doors, sounding like the caterwauling bells and clamor of a Naboo peace summit. But there was no peace here.

 

“We have to find help!” Billaba whispered to him over her shoulder when he reached her side. She pressed her lightsaber into his shaking hands, adding calmly, “Just like I showed you, okay?”

 

Then the Jedi Master vaulted around the door frame directly into a squad of troopers with blasters at the ready.

 

Calling upon the Force, Billaba cast the troopers into a disorganized pile and dashed past, with Caleb following close behind. They vaulted through the Temple hallways looking for allies, but the cries for help seemed to come from every direction. They raced past fallen bodies without the time to name them as more troopers caught their trail and arranged over their comms to cut them off. As they rounded the foyer outside of the Archives, a horrific outcry of young voices erupted from its recesses. Billaba made a decision then, Caleb came to realize, and ran past the dark entryway, abandoning the younglings to their immediate demise.

 

Without knowing what was going on, their only option for safety was to escape through the lower levels of the dormitories, which lead into the chambers for the maintenance droids. The ventilation shafts there would lead into an access vault to the sewer reservoir. It was not the most glamorous escape, Caleb considered, but they did not have much choice with the squad shooting at their heels.

 

They turned a corner into the maintenance hall just as Caleb caught a loose bolt of blaster fire on his calf. Billaba turned to defend him, but caught a shot on the shoulder, which sent her careening into the opposite wall. Still, she managed to haul him back into the air with the Force and ungracefully launched him into the access wall, knocking an array of covers off the ventilation chutes in the act.

 

“Pick a vent, any vent!” she called to him cheekily in spite of the present danger.

 

“Master?!”

 

“Just go! Run!”

 

The Force was a natural, ineffable, and unlucky power that governed the fate of the surest. In that moment, Master Depa Billaba was sure to die. She slammed her palm against the door controls and locked the blast shields in place, directing her attention to the troopers. Caleb watched in horror as the blaster fire ricocheted off the rippling pink, back into her body.

 

Caleb turned away, choked with disbelief, and climbed into a random vent. The troopers howled at him from beyond the shield as they rushed to deactivate it, but he quickly disappeared into the dark. Instead of falling into the depths of the pipes to continue his grand escape, he squeezed a way into the main circulatory vent from above. While they pointed their scanners into the aquaducts below and organized a search party over their comms, Caleb had scrambled up and away into the drafty recesses of the ceiling and crawled dutifully back into the hallway.

 

Caleb silently mourned his Master’s once-fiery eyes, watching from above as the icy sheen of death crept over her nebulaic irises in the grim minutes that followed after she was shot down. When they dragged her body away, he was compelled to follow through the winding vents. He lost his remaining strength by the time that they had returned to the main doors of the Archives, and he collapsed onto a slatted screen to watch the morbid procession of his expired peers and mentors pass him by.

 

Minutes, hours, days later, he remained in the Temple, suspended in what he had desperately hoped was a dream, to no relief. No one came to wake him. In fact, no one ever came looking for Caleb Dume when he eventually dropped out of the ceiling and onto the scuffed marble floors. As the patrol’s light faded down the hallway, he willed his feet towards the nearest exit, but found himself gravitating towards the Archives. He blindly walked through the dark towards the grand hub lodged between the towering shelves, feeling the crunch of holo-glass underneath his boots. The shelves were deactivated and scarred by the ministrations of refractory droids, sent in to reap the technology of the Jedi. Whoever had planned this attack knew the Jedi stronghold intimately, this could not be disputed.

 

Caleb ran his hands over the empty, unlit shelves somberly. Like a ghost, he was walked through the valley of empty, turned over seats. He was spirited away into a memory of the Archives being full of sunlight and smiling faces. The silence of the great room was damning of the treachery committed here. He found a forgotten holo-cube sitting on a low shelf. The cube blinked with a message, one that he could not risk to play here.

 

Regardless, he knew not to expect to be comforted by this small token of an already past life. Whatever message there was to play would not make him forget what he had seen. Nothing could change the hollow feeling in his chest that threatened to envelop him. Nothing could give him Hope.

 

~0~

 

Kanan Jarrus did not hope to survive.

 

The arc of the crimson saber flashed around him like a snake's dancing preamble to a deadly bite. The curtains would soon close on his starring role in his own small production of defying the Empire. He watched with relief as Ezra turned and ran to catch up with the others, as his presence spiraled away into the loading bay. The fate of the galaxy was now secured in the hands of the Rebels like him who had the will to survive in spite of the circumstances, like Zeb and Sabine. And they would have fighting spirit of Hera Syndulla to guide them. He felt each of them secure aboard the vessel as it lapsed into the distended current of light, and even after they were gone--he was gone-- he would still parse out their phantom presence as clear as starlight in the dark.

 

All of the hope in the galaxy belonged to him in that moment.  Hope, after all, was just another property of matter. Something that the Empire couldn’t take from him as they scorched him with electrodes, tried to plant fear and dissent in his mind, and convince him that his life-- his secondhand, patchwork malady of a life-- was worth something more than the fates of his friends. Nothing could break him of his resolve to protect his allies, Jedi-training or not.

 

Of this, Kanan was sure.

 

He had no hope left for himself. From where Kanan stood, that was the true Force to be reckoned with.

**Author's Note:**

> Shortimer reporting for duty. Thank you for reading!


End file.
